Sunday, April 24, 2016

Marxists tell us that money is more powerful than anything else. I'm not so sure. Watching the primaries has reminded me of the power of race.

Which predicts voting patterns better: income or race/ethnicity? I want to compare all large ethnic groups in America, so let's choose Americans (like myself) of English descent as our comparison group since they were mostly likely to vote for Romney in 2012. For the first comparison, let's look at blacks. I ran a regression that includes this racial dichotomy along with income as predictors, voting for Obama over Romney as the outcome variable, and I list the standardized coefficients below:

Black .60
Income -.05

Income does not predict voting, but race is an extremely powerful predictor: Blacks were MUCH more likely than English-Americans to vote for Obama. Let's do those of Chinese descent next:

Chinese .13
Income -.08

Being Chinese (instead of English) had a stronger effect: It predicted voting for Obama more strongly than did poverty. Now let's look at an important ethnic group: Jews.

Jewish .23
Income -.09

Even with the small racial difference, being Jewish rather than English was a much better predictor of voting behavior than income. We're getting the picture here that race is a more powerful determinant of behavior, at least in the context of politics.

Here are the results for the other racial comparisons (all groups are compared with Americans of English descent):

Mexican .39
Income -.13

Japanese .12
Income -.13

Asian Indian .23
Income -.10

Puerto Rican .21
Income -.11

West Indian .13
Income -.13

Arab .07
Income -.12

American Indian .18
Income -.15

You can see that for Mexicans, Asian Indians, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians, race determines political orientation more than income. Race is just about as powerful as class for the other groups.

Economic determinists would predict that the race-voting correlation would disappear when income is controlled, but we see that income is the weaker influence. Removing the effect of income, minorities seem to vote out of fear, as if their security or values might be undermined if Republicans get too much power. (I didn't control for urbanness which might be another factor.)

Saturday, April 02, 2016

Folks, have you noticed how women think men are superior? Let's name male traits: competitive, physical, sports-loving, violent, ambitious, power-hungry, aggressive, sexual, worldly. Compared to when I was a kid in the 70s, women, freed to do what they please, have become more competitive, physical, sports-loving, violent, ambitious, power-hungry, aggressive, sexual, and worldly.

From the sixties, feminists have not claimed that they are the superior sex, and that, therefore, they should remain the same while men become identical to them--the standard of everything desirable.

I guess if men have always thought they were the best, and women betray the same beliefs by their actions, men actually are superior.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." ~ Lord Kelvin